Project Shinar

Navigate the strange world of The Mainframe, retrieving data and avoiding the security systems and traps the system puts in your way.

Project Shinar puts you in control of three robot agents working their way through the neon-glowing, hazardous circuits of a powerful computer. Make them work together across hundreds of levels of increasingly complex puzzles to discover the secrets held deep inside the system.

Important note

The current version of the game is pre-alpha. While a lot has been ported from the old Unity version, there are a lot of things missing, especially:

• Settings (screen res, vsync, quality, etc) - although see below.
• Level editor
• Many level entities (some of which may prevent level completion at this time!)
• NPC navigation grids
• Built-in feedback system

If you play this, expect bugs - but if you do play it and have comments or feedback, please tell me in the comments, or on Mastodon.

Also note that this is a development build of the game - the shipping build will be much smaller!

Notes

• Mouse control is the expected control method. At the moment gamepad is not supported. This will be added, but for now a mouse is required.
• When playing a level, holding down the right mouse button lets you rotate the camera around the active robot, mouse wheel zooms in/out. Left-clicking the robot portraits in the top left and top right of the screen will let you switch between robots. You can also left-click on a robot in view to make it the active robot.
• You get one, two, or three robots on a level:
  • CLR - a robot with a removal beam. Can delete some kinds of objects around the level... including your other robots, so be careful where you fire the beam.
  • PUSH - this robot can fire a beam that pushes some objects away from it. (including other robots).
  • MOVEP - use this robot's beam to collect data from data stores, or activate certain sorts of objects on levels.
• When you click on the "Toggle PEEK" button, a small drone called PEEK will appear that you can move around the level to get a better view - you can even control the robots while PEEK is active. However, PEEK itself can not interact with the level: it purely lets you look around. Click the "Toggle PEEK" button again to return the focus to the active robot.
• When a level loads, it pauses immediately to give you time to look around and work out your strategy. Pressing any of the direction/action buttons will unpause the game, or you can use the record feature to set up a program for the robot to follow.
• The controls you get on a level are:

(click image to enlarge)

Keyboard controls

Currently the controls can not be rebound - the interface for doing that is Coming Soon™. The following keyboard commands are defined in the game at the moment:

• Escape pauses/unpauses the game, or exits the current menu.
• F9 takes a screenshot without the UI
• F10 takes a screenshot with the UI
• While PEEK is active, W, A, S, D move PEEK around, E and C move it up and down.

Note about settings

As this is an Unreal Engine game, there are some settings you can change to control the game without a UI. Once unpacked, look in the game directory under ProjectShinar/Saved/Config/<platform>/GameUserSettings.ini file - in there you can change things like

• bUseVSync  - set to true or false to enable or disable vsync
• FrameRateLimit - set a frame limit (or 0 to unlimited) if vsync is disabled
• The values under [ScalabilityGroups] can be set between 0 (min) and 4 (max) to adjust performance v quality. Leave sg.ResolutionQuality=0.

Credits

Music

• In Cyber Mountains - Ascorbius: https://www.ascorbius.com/
  
• Screen Saver - Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech): https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5715-screen-saver

Sounds

• https://freesound.org/people/Speedenza/sounds/318559/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/xsub/sounds/28341/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/xsub/sounds/28342/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/Exacom/sounds/554672/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/patchytherat/sounds/532797/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/andersmmg/sounds/523425/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/kaligari/sounds/35391/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/RutgerMuller/sounds/104370/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/Euphrosyyn/sounds/382687/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/farbin/sounds/36785/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/Hydranos/sounds/237711/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/MeijstroAudio/sounds/377068/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/sidadrumbum/sounds/42977/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/TeamEnFil/sounds/699156/
  
• https://freesound.org/people/logant547/sounds/677736/

Updates will usually be accompanied by a devblog, but more progress can be seen via my Mastodon